Suriname starts free circumcision project
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Suriname has launched a three-month pilot project offering free circumcisions in a bid to cut sexually transmitted diseases, Health Minister Celsius Waterberg said Friday.
Circumcision “could also minimize the risk of HIV infection”, he said, adding the project would run in the capital city, Paramaribo.
Some two percent of the Suriname population is HIV-infected, about 10,000 people, and the project aims to carry out the operations on 100 men aged between four and 21 years old over the next three months.
If successful then the project will spread nationwide, Waterberg said.
March 14th, 2009 8:28 pm
If adult men want to have the best part of their penis cut off for any reason or none, they should be free to do so, though the benefits are so dubious that it should not be at public or expense.
Studies are conflicting about whether it prevents sexually transmitted diseases, and the African studies that claim to show it delays HIV infection (only of men by women, not in the other direction or by men) are contradicted by the facts. In seven African countries (Cameroon, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Swaziland, and Tanzania) a higher proportion of circumcised men have HIV than non-circumcised.
But doing it to children too young to give informed consent is a human rights abuse.